Project Description

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Overview

HLB Mann Judd is a leading and award-winning mid-tier-chartered accounting and financial services firm located in Perth and is ranked in the Top 12 accounting firms in Western Australia. The firm is a member of the HLB Mann Judd Australasian Association, which consists of 9 member firms and 3 representative firms across Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji. HLB Mann Judd is also part of HLB International, the global advisory and accounting network that has member firms in 157 countries and staff in 1,030 offices worldwide.

Business Challenge

HLB Mann Judd had a management reporting system which required extensive amounts of manual work to update and maintain and was susceptible to human error. This resulted in a quarter end process taking up to 6 weeks and extremely inflexible to respond to last minute changes. Month end reporting process was impossible.

How Access Analytic Helped

We worked with the firm’s Financial Manager to develop an automated system, which is directly refreshable from the accounting system (at the start – Reckon, then MYOB). The system automatically produced interactive P&L, Balance Sheet and Equity reports, as well as KPIs.

We utilised Power Query and Power Pivot to build a reporting model that contained 4 years’ worth of actuals and budget data in a single file, allowing ease of historic comparison.

The report allows quick “slicing” of the data by Year, Month and Entity and provided consolidated numbers with prior year comparison and budget variance analysis. A separate report showed both actual and budget KPIs for the prior 4 years.

Rigorous error checks have been built in to ensure data is correctly loaded and reflected in the reports. Easy to follow instructions and flow chart have been provided to facilitate seamless user experience.

The process of finalising management reports has been reduced from up to 6 weeks to approximately 10 working days, which has made it possible to introduce month-end reporting that has freed up a substantial portion of the Finance team’s time for other value-adding work.

Business Benefits

  • Significantly reduced time and effort required to produce and update month, quarter, and year-end reports.
  • Enhanced functionality and reporting to provide more frequent and better analysis and visibility.
  • An automated process which was highly flexible and can be changed and adapted quickly to meet the needs of a dynamic business environment
  • Because the reporting system was constructed by Access Analytic, there was minimal impact on the business’s own staff, allowing them to focus on other business critical tasks and projects.
  • Introduced key staff to a new technology toolset in the form of Power Query and Power Pivot which has had ongoing business benefits.